Generally, a radiator is placed in the front part of a vehicle so that cooling water is cooled with outside air introduced into an engine compartment and an engine is cooled to an appropriate temperature with the cooling water. Further, in order to improve the warm-up performance and prevent combustion failure caused by excessive cooling of an engine with cooling water, there has also been widely put to practical use a configuration in which a vehicle shutter that is capable of opening and closing an outside air introduction path for introducing outside air into an engine compartment as needed is provided so that the cooling temperature of cooling water by a radiator can be adjusted.
Normally, as the vehicle shutter, there is employed one that is provided with a plurality of flaps each of which is supported so as to be freely turnable around a horizontal axis, a linkage section which openably and closably links the flaps with each other, and a drive section which drives the flaps to be open and closed through the linkage section. Further, there has also been proposed a vehicle shutter that is provided with a detection section which detects the load of the drive section so that when the load of the drive section increases, for example, due to adhesion of a flap or a foreign matter being caught by a flap, the abnormality is notified to a user (see Patent Document 1, for example).